Conveyor systems having conveyor such as, for example, conveyor belts are known from practice for a plurality of fields of use. Conveyor systems can be provided, for example, for transporting objects such as piece goods in an automated fashion and at the same time, for example, separating them. The separated piece goods can subsequently be sorted, fed to further conveyor belts and/or placed in a rolling container. Piece goods may be here, for example, packages such as parcels or letters, but can also be other objects such as non-packaged goods or intermediate products.
Packaged items can be transported in terms of logistics in vehicles as bulk goods and stored in parts of a conveyor system as bulk goods. Modern methods of unloading technology also permit efficient unloading of interchangeable containers with packaged items in such a way that packaged items can be fed to the conveyor equipment as bulk goods. In terms of logistics, bulk goods can be essentially classified here into three classes: 3D bulk, 2D bulk and 1D bulk. In the case of 3D bulk, packaged items lie one on the other or one under the other, one next to the other and one in front of the other or one behind the other in an unordered sequence. In the case of 2D bulk, packaged items lie one next to the other and one in front of the other or one behind the other in an unordered sequence but not one on the other or one under the other. In the case of 1D bulk, packaged items lie one behind the other in an unordered sequence but not one next to the other or one under the other or one on the other. Packaged items lie one behind the other, in particular, precisely when essentially two packaged items are congruent when viewed from the side (at a right angle to the conveying direction). In this context, the distance between the packaged items is not significant. Moreover, packaged items are considered, in particular, to be separated if they are arranged with an intermediate distance greater than zero in the 1D bulk or 2D bulk.
In many conveyor systems, the transportation takes place firstly as 3D bulk or as 2D bulk. However, in most areas of conveyor systems, the transportation of packaged items takes place as a stream of piece goods, that is to say as 1D bulk, since this is the only way that the individual package can be fed to its end point in the system.
It is problematic here that the packaged items are as a rule to be introduced into the conveyor system as 3D bulk and then have to be subjected to a separation process (singulation) in order to firstly generate 2D bulk from the 3D bulk and finally generate 1D bulk. There is a need to optimize this process as much as possible in order to achieve a high throughput rate of packaged items. This can be comparatively costly and depend on a large number of factors which, however, cannot also be predicted. For example, packaged items of a wide variety of sizes in a wide variety of arrangements and sequences may be present in the 3D bulk.